Reputable/easy Co.&#39;s To Help Build A Blog?

The title says it all. -- I'm in the market to pay somebody to help me construct a pretty/functional blog within my vision scope. -- I've tossed around 99 designs... any other ideas as to a company that can help you build a blog to your spec? I also like the idea of establishing an ongoing relationship so as to help upgrade or tweak on the fly at future endeavors...

0

Comments

I'm not sure I'd pay for a design from scratch. I might pay for a general logo/branding/color scheme type of thing, but for the blog itself there are many easy tools where you can just apply your branding. The main functionality is updates, automatic organization of content, and comments. Wordpress and Blogger have those, plus you can customize the look and feel. If you use a website creator like Wix or Squarespace, they have blog set-ups too.

I have Wordpress and paid 99 designs for a nice looking logo.. but at this point after poking around in WordPress, i've come to think that maybe it would be best to just trick the thing out and not cause myself the extra headache. My job is pretty demanding as is....

Or I could stop being lazy and learn this stuff myself. -- Just seems that there's such a massively deep well of worpress coding tactics that I've yet to learn or explore and at this point I'd much rather have a "plug-and-play" blog up and running versus wasting more precious time. Though this isn't cheap!

If I were giving advice to myself in this situation, I'd say to not worry about that stuff. Worry about producing content, and after you've developed a solid habit of developing this website, you can make it slick. You see this with pretty much any blogger who develops a reputation for solid content. Typically, they write for years before they get a mind to spiffy things up. Sometimes they never do that. This is why I decided to do a 'nameless' wordpress blog. If I try to brand myself now, I'll likely pigeon-hole myself.

There are sneaky ways that procrastination pops up, and this is one of them. It's a productive form of procrastination, yes. It is procrastination nonetheless because it keeps you from doing what's important.

If I were giving advice to myself in this situation, I'd say to not worry about that stuff. Worry about producing content, and after you've developed a solid habit of developing this website, you can make it slick. You see this with pretty much any blogger who develops a reputation for solid content. Typically, they write for years before they get a mind to spiffy things up. Sometimes they never do that. This is why I decided to do a 'nameless' wordpress blog. If I try to brand myself now, I'll likely pigeon-hole myself.

There are sneaky ways that procrastination pops up, and this is one of them. It's a productive form of procrastination, yes. It is procrastination nonetheless because it keeps you from doing what's important.

Good points.. but respectfully from my standpoint I think about it a little bit differently:

1) People tend to take things seriously when the thing in question takes itself seriously and looks professional. (Though I definitely agree that we tend to drift towards over-analyzing minutia versus focusing on the "meat" of what matters in an embryonic scenario such as this)

2) The self critical part of me would be too caught up in my pseudo lack of legitimacy if I didn't have SOME sort of home base that looks presentable and respectable.

3) It's an accountability "forced hand" for my content: I invested money into something looking good and I want to produce content that supports this aesthetic and also lives up to the longevity I hope to achieve. Not investing off the bat is saying you don't really want to commit just in case.

if you want customizing... wordpress can be installed on a webserver, and you get a whole lot more options for customizing and widgets. I'd start with a free Wordpress.com site, and build up content before you make a big investment. It's easy to fall off the wagon (or is it on the wagon?).

And I'm going to let you know right away, it's going to be a headache and there is going to be road bumps as well as blocks. One company I had paid to help develop site ended up causing more damage (oh they got the theme to look right, but then caused the site to drop for 2 days), and in the end I and another person had to learn how to do what it was that we wanted and doing all the work I had paid for myself.

I've done business with one company in.... uh... dang >.> India, and they were great to work with and did everything that was needed. Sure there was a slight language barrier but with the power of screenshots and paint much was accomplished.

My honest advice, learn some of it. You're going to want to know how it works and how to fix some of it, because if your site breaks from a plugin update (Oh man... this happens SO much with Wordpress) and you want it back up chances are you're going to need to do it yourself. Because either the tech guys are in a timezone that is currently snoozing, or they are busy with other projects. It isn't too difficult to figure out and learn, and wordpress has TONS of tutorials and guides on the web, as do most of the plugins. CSS, HTML, FTP are some of the more important ones to look into.

I'm not saying to do it ALL by yourself, but know about all of it (even if what you know is only a fraction of the info out there) so that you can potentially fix a issue or at least know how to explain what the issue is by saying more than just "Why is my site down? It keeps 404ing and I don't understand why when it does come up XYZ".

Also if you experience a site break, first thing you should ask yourself is "WTF plugin did I update or install" because 80% that's the problem. What you will need developers for is either fixing the site or tweaking a plugin so that it can work on the site without killing the website, but if the plugin has an alternative out there then go for that.

I am in the midst of building my own website to offer Neuroptimal services and i used a really easy to follow tutorial by a guy called Tyler Moore on YouTube.

I've not personally watched the blog based tutorial but followed his "How to make a wordpress site - 2015" tutorial to a tee and it was incredibly helpful. Really engrained easy to use tweaks to make the site my own.

Use Bluehost to host your Wordpress site and pick a blog theme. Bluehost has a simple click of a button installation for installing Wordpress. If starting a blog you should really listen to Millionaire Blogger podcast, some of the best information out there. If you still want someone else to do it, you can use my method. I hired a student from Georgia Tech with strong web design skills for a fraction of the price. If there is a good college close to where you live this is a great inexpensive option. Hope this helps some, I understand being so busy that you just need to outsource something.